Posted
by
michael
on Friday November 08, 2002 @08:54AM
from the knock-knock-who's-there dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This has got to be, or will be when they actually make one, the coolest amphibious vehicle around. It's a cross between a motorcycle and a jet ski, and it seats three. It can travel at 200 mph on land and 50 mph on water. Just what you need to get you from point A to point B."

Actually, the inverted tricycle design (two wheels in front, one wheel at the back) is quite stable, as stable as a four-wheel design (except when going in reverse, I guess). Of course you'd probably not be able to safely turn with a regular tricycle design at any speed higher than 30 MPH...

As for betting from A to B... who would use this for a daily vehicle? Recreation, definately, but recreational vehicles aren't genarally used for 'A to B' travel.

Are you kidding? A buddy of mine commutes to work about 15km or so each way a day alongside a lake (Gardiner/QEW for those who know). This would be great (assuming it was legal). Instead of being stuck in traffic averaging a crappy 40kph, he could zoom along the lake at 100kph+ unrestricted, his commute time would easily be cut in half, and he'd have a lot more fun:-)

Driving home to visit the family involves 4 hours of highway torture. If I could just head down LakeShore Drive, cut across the beach, and boat my way across at least I wouldn't waste my time on the Dan Ryan developing road rage. I don't know if I'd save time, but the stress reduction would be awesome.

Well, either that or working mass transit that is affordable, clean, and speedy. Likely that we won't see either in our lifetimes eh?

P.S. I traded my SUV for a van. Surburban police don't understand that it's an ORV either. I got too many tickets/warnings for driving in the ditch to get around traffic. I tried to explain how I was helping the gridlock by getting out of the lane and making room for others, but nobody bought it...:(

As for betting from A to B... who would use this for a daily vehicle? Recreation, definately, but recreational vehicles aren't genarally used for 'A to B' travel./blockquote>

Hmm, imagine living in a city surrounded by water and bridges such as Vancouver or San Francisco. In Vancouver commuting via 'blueways' (aka water) is a viable option for some people - the ability to take your boat with you would make it even more viable!

Yay. Hundreds of SUV owners use their SUVs in some close approximation of how the television tells them it should be used.

Compare that to the thousands who use them almost exclusively to commute, pick up groceries, or take the kids to soccer practice.

Not to mention the whole debate you hinted at--that these vehicles aren't actually even appropriate for the kind of use that the television proposes. Or the debate about whether or not the drivers are properly qualified for these fantastical depictions of "extreme driving".

Your Landrover website aside, the trend seems to be as follows: Your television tells you to buy the SUV for its extreme driving capability. You do what you television tells you to do, and then use the SUV almost exclusively for mundane driving tasks.

Meanwhile, companies like Subaru and Volvo are making AWD cars that not only have superior extreme driving capabilities, but have smaller footprints, better mileage, better price points, and significantly less emissions.

I have no patience for your Landrover enthusiasts. The amount of money they're spending to bounce over muddy tussocks is laughable. The visual obstruction they pose on the highway, and the level of pollution they contribute in pursuit of their own amusement, promptly drains all the humor out of the situation. Go offroad all you want. I'm not against having fun. But keep your over-sized, gas-guzzling, luxury follies the fuck away from my commute.

The reason three wheels we not popular in my opinion is that they are unsafe at high speeds. It certainly looks cool, but I travelling at such high speeds can get you killed faster in the water than on land.

Actually, the current land speed record holder [cnn.com] is a three-wheeled gas turbine powered vehicle. Two wheels up front and a pair of co-linear wheels in the rear.. They had some stability issues at the prototype stage, but the car that they ultimated ran worked fine..

From what I can see, this three wheel design looks less stable at high speeds in a corner. The non-steering wheels take more lateral pressure in a corner, so should be spread wider. This thing appears to have the front wheels stearing and the back not.

Tricycles (1 front wheel, two back) are quite stable because cornering puts pressure to the side and rear of the vehicle, on the non-stearing wheels. Front only has to apply lateral force to turn. The back has to hold it up.

There were some expriments with three wheel vehicles, two front one rear where the rear wheel steared, like a reverse tricycle. It was considered to be a good preformer but difficult to handle intuitively. The rear wheel gave to lateral force by steering, so was not supporting as much pressure as this thing will be. Various accidents gave it a bad name and the design was dropped. There are still some proponents, but the design has not returned to the main stream.

Tricycles (1 front wheel, two back) are quite stable because cornering puts pressure to the side and rear of the vehicle, on the non-stearing wheels. Front only has to apply lateral force to turn. The back has to hold it up.

Tricycles with one wheel in front are very unstable. Cornering puts pressure to the side and front of the vehicle.

Three wheeled recreational all-terrain-vehicles (ATV's) were very popular in the 1980's, until people got tired of broken arms and collar bones from when they rolled in sharp turns. Almost all of the ATV's sold today are four wheelers.

A boat is designed to be a wing. You want the least amount of boat in the water that you possibly can, so you construct it to lift up and out the faster you go. But on land, you want the vehicle to press down onto the ground, the opposite direction as in the water.

Like the space shuttle, this "landshark" sounds like it was engineered for coolness and not from genuine requirements.

I'd imagine the suspension is adjustable in the front. Air bags or coil over or something where it would actually bring the front end down and the back end up at least to the same height if not higher than the front.

Either way, when my car hits 130mph and I'm feeling kinda scared, I don't think I could handle going much faster than that. Besides, RWD at 200mph? a little lite in the back end would be DAMN scary/dangerous!

It's a Hydrofoil boat on the water. Perhaps the hydrofoil can be tucked up into the body while on land? It can keep it's center of gravity low and also employ veriable pitch airfoils for downforce while on land. This is not built like a typical V-Hull Grady White.

If you had read the article you would see that it has variable position mud flaps in the front that change the aero-hydro performance of the machine.

Even if it did not have that feature, it would be very easy to design a shape that, taking into account the fact that air and water have enormously different densities, would spoil lift for high speed land applications and still lift up out of the water at comparatively tiny speeds...

you want the vehicle to press down onto the ground, the opposite direction as in the water.

The animation should give you a clue that the designers thought of this. Take a wing section that has no camber to it and point the front up in a breeze. The net force will be up and back. Point it down and the net force will be down and back. On land, the crafts nose points down due to the high rear suspension. In the water the craft hudroplanes out of the water, nose up, on the front nose flaps.

Your general physics knowledge should have you understand that the great difference between the working fluids would work to take care of things even if the landshark folks had not been as clever as you. The upward force created by displacing and accelerating water is orders of magnitude greater than those created by air.

It's funny that you worry about flipping right over as well. Boats that become airborn due to excessive lift and speed often do flip right over, as anyone who's ever watched a jet boat wipe out would know. I don't design high speed boats, but I'll question your overall premise. Oh yeah, 50 mph is not that high a speed on the water.

Like the space shuttle, this "landshark" sounds like it was engineered for coolness and not from genuine requirements.

Now that is a troll. The space suttle has performed very well as a reusable launch vehicle with very good turn around time. Figure out the cost of disposable rockets for each of the shuttle's missions and you might see the practicality.

Back to topic. The performance of the Landshark might be improved by not using the pump for land traction. I would suggest front wheel drive, retractable rear wheels and a seperate water pump. Ride quality is adversely effected by the non sprung pump weight, and three wheel suspensions are less stable than four wheel suspensions. 200 MPH is a little faster than I want to go on the ground, especially with a pump for a rear wheel.

The posts so far seemed to have missed the funniest line of the skit... Candygram!

For those who don't know, the skit was Landshark from the 1970's Saturday Night Live program. At the time 'Jaws' was new at the movies. Chevy Chase played the shark, and in one episode was Larraine Newman sitting at home in her apartment when the doorbell rings...

Who is going to use a motorcycle for the water? Why do geeks always feel the need to shoehorn technology into purposes for which it wasn't intended? A motorcycle should be for use on ROADS. If you have the need to travel on water, people, _buy a boat_. Once again, our obsession for technology prevails in the face of reason. What will be next? Internet access for telephones? Where will this madness end?

Simple answer - Traffic. i live in Dublin near the coast. To travel to work every morning takes an hour and a half. With something like this I could be in work in 25 minutes by crossing Dublin Bay and travelling up the canal.

Although, somehow I doubt you'd ever get up to 200mph on any road in Dublin!

My goodness people, can't you see humour when it's staring you right in the face. Did you not read the line "What will be next? Internet access for telephones?". Come on now, get up from the keyboard, but the coffee/jolt down, spend an hour with your girlfriend/boyfriend/hand/other device, get some sleep, go outside (don't forget the sunblock) and enjoy a real life for a little while before you come back and reply to posts again.

The combined drive system is really clever, but I wonder how it will hold up... The impeller is mounted on the drive wheel, the wheel moves over the uneven surface of the road, and adsorbs shocks from all the bumps, so what I want to know is: how the heck are you going to build impeller seals that will hold up to that and still hold a tight tolerance?

The way I see it the impeller can actually be the rim and not rotating with respect to the tire, thus it wouldn't need seals/bearings like a regular waterpump does.

On the other hand, there has to be a wheel cap stationary with respect to the body, that has a rear-facing slot for the propulsion jet. Now between this cap and the rim you'd need a seal, but if you make the cap ultralight then the seal won't be that hammered.

Of course, you could put the impeller on bearings and work it out that way, but I don't think that's necessary.

If you just paint the thing black you will have a nifty Batman like toy. It looks like a veicle that only a supper hero would drive, not that that's wrong or eny thing. I think that the design would make an amazing remot controled veicle.

New thinkgeek blurb:Do you want to scare your co-workers, destroy litle boats in park ponds, or just send mesages ashore from your house boat? Then this is the best thing that you'll ever want NEW MINI SHARK

i imagine they have a different audience in mind with this one. the folks that live in/on bainbridge and have to take the ferry over everyday to work in downtown seattle could save a lot of time with something like this.

it could eventually be marketed like the current SUV market. people will buy them just because they're percieved to be kewl.

Oh that's easy. Some whack-jobs dropped a couple of planes on these tall buildings here and not even the trains [nyc.ny.us] were running..... And there's still soldiers with machine guns hanging around all the bridges. I'm not rich enough to own a helicopter for getting off this island, but if anyone actually invests enough money for the Land Shark to get built at the price claimed, it might be an option.

...and I'm only semi-joking. I live next to the Thames in Marlow (~20 miles to the west of London), and if I could use this to get into central London before nipping out and finishing the rest of the journey by road, I'd be delighted.

I really can't see the point of this. It's not interesting or cool from a technical point of view, it's not cool in anything but a mine is bigger/faster than yours and my dick is really big enough, really ! kind of way. Just seems to me like another way to get yourself killed, in a way that might not be efficient but still very fast indeed.

Not really, several motorcycles available today are capable (with minor mods) of going that fast. And motorcycles are grossly non-aerodynamic so it takes a lot of ponies to get them up to that speed. Since the LandShark is an enclosed vehicle and would theoretically have a much better cd, it shouldn't take too much effort to get it to go that fast.

Now would I want to be in a three wheeled vehicle at those speeds, no way in hell. I'd do it on 2 in a second, but three would seem like a rolling coffin to me.

several motorcycles available today are capable (with minor mods) of going that fast.

That, sir, is a load of bunk. Take the fastest production motorcycle in the world: The Suzuki GSX1300R. It's not the most powerful production motorcycle, but darn close. It has an aerodynamic advantage over other more powerful bikes that give it its high top speed.

It turns out that you have to spend double the original price of the bike just to get it to travel in the mid 190 mph range. The modifications require major alteration of the motor.

You have to spend cubic money to get that last 15 mph.

By the way, cd isn't the only factor in calculating drag. Motorcycles have high cd compared to cars, but they also have tiny frontal area. A three wheeled car with a better cd and five times as much frontal area loses all its advantage.

It turns out that you have to spend double the original price of the bike just to get it to travel in the mid 190 mph range

Well all the bike rags I've read have claimed a stock Busa will do around 190 (check any of the rags online, such as CycleWorld). Slap a turbo charger and/or some nitros (both together should not add up to the anywhere near the cost of the orignal bike) and 200 is no problem indeed. Now I've not personally ridden a Busa/Blackbird/ZX12 nor do I personally know anyone who's gone that fast, but I'm assuming that the trade rags are pretty close and that it's not all Suzuki marketing.

As for the frontal area, I am aware of that, but looking at the drawings it doesn't appear that it's frontal area would be anywhere near five times, or even twice as large. Hard to say from the drawings, but one would imagine that if they want to hit that 200mpg mark that they'd have to pay careful attention to the aerodynamic aspects, both in terms of speed, but more importantly in terms of stability.

Sport Rider, this summer had an in depth article on mounting a Hahn Racecraft turbo system on a Hayabusa. It netted them over thirty horsepower, and took the bike to a top speed of (drumroll please) 197 mph. The turbo was not easy to install, and it wasn't cheap.

NOX injection does remarkable things for drag racers, but there's just not enough juice in the bottle to provide sustained horesepower for top speed runs.

I owned a CBR1100XX Blackbird for several years, one of the original carbureted 97 models. I took it up to an indicated 165mph once. I say indicated because the speedometer error on virtually all motorcycles is somewhere near 10%, so I may have been travelling as slow as 150mph. Slug-like, to be sure. At any rate, while it was still accelerating impressively at 150mph, it was no where near the thrust from 90 to 130. All that air just piles up in front of you when you start going that fast. Something about the cube of the speed...

I would still bet that the frontal area of the Landshark is between 4 and 6 times that of a CBR1100XX. These fast bikes have a remakably small frontal profile.

The Mr Turbo turbo kit is ~$4000, cheap, no, but still not "double the cost" of the original bike. Plus, with NOX, you wouldn't have it on for the duration of the run, you would hit the button once you've already achieved a particular speed that should easily get you past 200mph, though admittedly only for a short time.

I took it up to an indicated 165mph once.

I've had my ~95hp VFR up to an indicated 155 and it was still pulling (and I'm 6'1" and had a tank bag), so I would think that your 165 was still not near the top of what it was capable of (and no, the VFR probably only had a couple more mph in her, but she hadn't topped out yet). And yes, going from 90 to 130 is simple beans compared to 130-150, but that's what you'd expect right? Doesn't mean that you can't get there.

So if a stock Busa makes ~150hp and the turbo bumped it up to ~180hp (note that we're talking superbike numbers now, and they have been clocked at over 200mph, along with ~190hp gp bikes), assuming improved aerodynamics and not a too significant increase in weight, releasing a vehicle at about ~200-250hp could get you to that magic 200mpg mark, even if it takes "the right conditions" (drag strip, cool weather, favorable breeze) to get it to that mark. Remember, it just has to do it once for them to claim that it can do it.

Now would I want to be in a three wheeled vehicle at those speeds, no way in hell.

Actually, 3 wheels (2F/1R) can be very stable. There are several human power trikes with this same configuration, generally very stable at 50+.
As long as you don't try to implement rear wheel steering. Then you will crash.

I don't see how a centrifugal compressor will drive this thing the way it's been illustrated. Normally a centrifugal compressor takes axial flow and turns it into radial flow. According to the website they are using it to take in water upstream of the hub and blast it out a slot at the rear. They way this thing appears to be designed they are wasting an incredible amount of energy just spinning the flow around inside the rear wheel. I hate to think what cavitation will do to this thing.

Note to landshark guys: It aint a turbine unless you're extracting power from the flow. In your case it's just a centrigual pump. Mount a forward pointing scoop that directs flow down the axis of the pump, then collect _all_ the radial flow and direct it out the exit.

PS. You are driving this thing with the equivalent of the guts of an air-raid siren. How appropriate.

Notice how there are no real pictures of this thing on the site? That's because the fine print says that it currently exists only as a "1/3rd scale clay model." The history page goes right up to the point (over a year ago) when they were trying to turn that model into a working... 1/3rd model. Huh, I'll bet I know why the history stops there.

Most revealing line from the history: "Oct 2000, work put on hold as promised investment fails to materialise." That's because the investors realized this guy is smoking crack for all kinds of reasons.

Hey, I gotta clay model that'll do 60 mph on water and 240 on land. Really, honestly. It'll be roling off the lot just as soon as I get the funding. Can I get linked by Slashdot too?

Anyone actually look at the website, there are no real pictures of this thing. It's all vapourware, with some nice animations and things (i'm guessing the guy who started it was some sort of automotive designer (possibly laid off?). The rest of the site was so slow I couldn't check it out.

Lots of people are commenting on how this will actually work, since there are problems with lift/downward force, making the impellor stable enough to work both on land (with lots of shock) and in the water (keeping it sealed). Then there are things like Hydroplaning the thing with two big front wheels ( hydroplanes mounted in the mudguards??).

All a pipedream.. after all they have built amphibious cars in the 50's onward, and they are interesting to see but not a seller. You want either a boat or a car, each item does a specific job well.. not some mediocure item that does both.

Jesus, the fastest and biggest motorbikes cant reach 200mph, yet this thing can carry three people, and could have as small as a 400cc engine (according to the article). Don't think so somehow!

Also, all those people saying 3 wheels are unstable at speed should have a look at Thrust SSC [thrustssc.com]. OK, it had four wheels but the rear two were very close together like a trike, and also steered.

Modded informative my ass, bikes can go well in excess of 200 mph. There is a current agreement among bike manufactures to limit top speeds to 188, but bikes will easily top that. And for the record, bigger does not necessarily equate to faster.

If you have KaZaa, do a search for videos with "motorcycle street race". You will find many street bikes easily hitting the upper 180's and getting there very fast. I don't know if they are gear or electronically limited but it appears based on the rate of acceleration they could easily go much faster. You might find some videos with Google but you have to wade through the junk. Of course, none of the videos I've seen had three people on the bike at those speeds, they may have started with three but did not end with them;)

I'm getting way off topic here but you can find a lot of Darwin Award candidates in those motorcycle videos also.

This project will fail. Period. And I don't mean because of engineering problems (ie actually getting the damn thing to work). It will fail because of one simple rule that applies to almost all inventions of this type:
Any device that attempts to do two completely different things will do neither of them well.
Prime example: The "spork"- how many do you own?

be that as it may, it's _extremely_ difficult to make a vechicle do 200mph sustained. You can do it one of two ways:

a)Serious Cubic Horsepower

b)Serious Aerodynamic design

If you choose 'a' above, be prepared to generate 600+ hp, also be prepared to protect your occupant when the vehicle loses directonal stability.

If you choose 'b' above, you may be able to get along with significantly less hp (400-500), but be prepared to spend cubic dollars renting a wind tunnel, or hardware/software to perform a lot of number crunching.

Remember, HP goes up with the _cube_ of speed change. If your car does 150mph with a 215hp motor (Turbo Neon, this month's Road n track) and you want it to go 1.33 times faster, it'll take 1.33^3*215hp or 505hp to make 200 mph...

An additional datapoint: My vette has done 168mph with 350 crank hp (automatic, nevada, coupla thousand feet above sealevel, so figure some hp loss there.) So a.29 Cd vehicle, with a TON of aero work can do this pretty calmly. Take that exact same envelope to 195 or so and it's aerodynamics are no longer adequate to task, it's gets pretty hairy handling. (and takes 575 hp...more than the neon because it punches a bigger hole in the air, and there are differences in driveline efficency and gearing)

Wouldn't there be a significant drop in wind resistance as well due to the thinner air? I would think that this is more important at the speeds you are talking about than the hp loss. Plus at that speed your engine is probably getting sufficient air intake, don't you think?

I could be wrong, I feel no need to drive a fast car, so I don't know too much about this.

Clearly this is the "killer app" for drug smugglers... pack that baby full of coke and out run and out swim any DEA vehicles. All it needs now is a Stinger [fas.org] mount to deal with those pesky helicopters...

As a guy who thinks the boat chase scene in 'Live and Let Die' is still one of the seminal movie chase scenes, I can't wait until this contraption shows up in a Bond movie. Hope they pay the stunt guy well.

have any of you ever done 200 mph on a bike? The fastest I've ever gone was upwards of 130 on a friends gsxr750 (hwy 1 doesn't have a long enough straight away in the 10 miles north of santa cruz so I couldn't get it going any faster), and let me tell you that it's no picnic. It's kinda hard to imagine exactly how fast that is. I mean we've all gone faster than that in airplanes, but when you're on the ground, and you realize that a squirrel running in front of you will turn you in to a meat torpedo. It's pretty fucking scary.

I can't even imagine going to 200 mph on a bike with tires set for water. that would just be insane

I doubt top speed will be 50. I've owned Jet Skis, and one thing you learn about is cavitation, and something call the Scoop Grate.

Basically, the stock setup that came with my KW-650SX goes barely 40Mph. But it was because at 40Mph, not enough water is going through the impeller. So, with the simple addition of an after market scoop grate, I added about 3Mph (All it did was lower the scoop about 1/4 an inch. I got another 2Mph out of a stainless steel prop, and anouth 2Mph out of a new ride plain.

Pulling in water as it passes alog the side of a wheel just won't work.

It's a really cool design though to have the wheels sucking in water to pump out, but he really needs to redesign. Basically, you need to scoop the water in.

Also, since it's a fairly heavy thing, it can actually go faster on water that 50Mph because of the added stability. My stand-up jet-ski weighs about 260lbs and at 46Mpg its a not a pleasure cruise, but on a heavier 550lbs waverunner it is a pleasure to cruise at even 50Mph.

Rethink the water intake to something more direct and it'll go more like 75-95 on water. Horseopower isn't the issue, fluid dynamics is.

volkswagen had a functional device like this in WW2, called the schimmenwagen -excuse spelling, that is probably close. It was a variant on their kubbelwagen, sold in the US as "the thing", but had a rounded floatation body and I think a power take off prop that lowered into the water in the rear. I've seen pics of them, they look rather normal in a dune buggy sort of way, and would probably sell if someone made them or a mod for existing beetles. I know I would like one, being a jeep driver, the ability to just keep trucking in deep water has a certain appeal to me, calm water anyway. My experience with modded bugs (bajas) is such that they can already go around 90% of the places (something like that) that a normal stock CJ can go, and if they were amphibious, slick! I'd love to be able to drive to the lake here and just keep going, go fishing and diving, etc, without towing a boat or hauling a canoe. If VW was to bring them back, and use their superior diesel tech, even better, as long as the cost was not too outrageous. Don't really care about the ability to go 200 land or 50 water, normal highway speeds are adequate, and ten in the water is adequate.

I've seen one. It's very scary. I wouldn't go in the water in one, and it didn't look too capable as a land car either. I loved the wood-slatted floor boards so the passengers don't get their feet wet when it fills with water.

Of course, the schwimwagen would only go 70kph max. Now if you packed a 2331cc, dual Dellorto carb monster motor with Chevy rods, aluminum pop-up pistons, a hot cam and nice crank, I'll bet you can ski behind one. But the whole idea of just saying "fuck bridges" is too cool to dismiss the schwim simply because the wet feet.

While waiting for the Landshark to transition from 1/3 clay model to working prototype to production, you can pass the time tooling around in a Corbin Sparrow [corbinmotors.com] electric car. Or for pure brute speed order a Merlin Roadster [corbinmotors.com] from Corbin.